This Week in Fiction: Thomas Pierce

This week’s story, “Shirley Temple Three,” is about a dwarf mammoth, which, thousands of years after the extinction of its species, has been cloned and brought to live with Mawmaw, a recent retiree in a small southern town. When did you start thinking about having a mammoth show up in twenty-first-century America?

I’ve been fascinated by mammoths for a long time. When I was in elementary school I had to choose a special research topic for a class. It was one of those projects where you spend weeks and weeks reading in the library and then you paste a bunch of pictures and text onto a giant cardboard display. A friend of mine chose the sabre-toothed Tiger, and I chose the woolly mammoth. At some point in the process I learned about all the well-preserved mammoth carcasses that have been discovered with the stomachs still full of food. I was mesmerized by that. I still am. I click on every article with “mammoth” or “mastodon” in the title. In fact not long after I finished this story, there was an article that came out about some newly discovered dwarf mammoths that might have been waist-high. There’s probably a reason for all those articles. Mammoth and mastodon obsession goes way back in America. We were fascinated by them even before we knew what they were exactly. When they first started reconstructing the skeletons in the nineteenth century, people couldn’t wait to see them. Thomas Jefferson hoped they weren’t actually extinct and told Lewis and Clark to be on the lookout for a live one on their way to the west coast. All this to say, I’m not sure when I first started thinking about dropping a mammoth into twenty-first-century America, but once it appeared, it somehow felt inevitable. To me, at least.

“Shirley Temple Three” is driven by quite an outlandish conceit, of course. Did that conceit give you the freedom to make up whatever you wanted, or did you draw on much scientific research?

I wanted to make sure Shirley was believable, more or less, and I researched that. Creating my own species made the job somewhat easier. In the story Shirley is a Bread Island-dwarf mammoth. Dwarf mammoths existed, but the Bread Island version did not (as far as I’m aware). That gave me some creative freedom in terms of what it looked like and how it behaved. I did not, however, read up on the latest cloning research. For all I know there’s a team of scientists out there right now who are on the verge of a major announcement about their cloned mammoth. Well, I doubt anyone is that close, but it’s conceivable. That aspect of the story—the cloning—didn’t seem too outlandish. The television show is a bit outlandish probably, but even that doesn’t seem too far-fetched given what’s on television these days. But having this mammoth wind up with Mawmaw, that was certainly outlandish. It’s also what interested me the most, their relationship. Once Shirley entered the story, I had this very clear image of it—this furry feat of modern science—rooting around in something as ordinary as a dog pen. My family lived in a house for about a year when I was a kid that had one of these pens. Our basset hound had to stay out there. All of us felt awful about it. She was out of sight and out of mind, until we moved and she had a backyard again. Seeing this mammoth in one of those pens opened up the story for me. It’s a little bit like Márquez’s old man with enormous wings in the chicken coop. It makes me think about how quickly each new discovery or technological development becomes old hat. Our nearly sentient cell phones, the Rover on Mars, and so forth. We’re amazed for ten seconds, then it’s ordinary. I think that happens in the story to some degree. An amazing creature wanders into the action but soon it becomes almost commonplace. At that point what matters most is not the science but that it’s a helpless creature and that Mawmaw has bonded with it and feels responsible for it.

Mawmaw takes in the creature after her son, Tommy, a charmingly feckless presenter on “Back from Extinction,” the TV show responsible for the cloning, asks her to help him prevent the euthanization of Shirley Temple Three. Did you know what kind of response Mawmaw would have to the mammoth, or did her actions ever surprise you as you were working on the story?

I knew, generally, that this was going to be a story about a woman let down by her son. I also knew a fair amount about Mawmaw—about her religion, her history, her loneliness, her cigarette allowance, her pills, her wedding party. That’s what I started with. But I wasn’t sure what her reaction would be after Tommy revealed the mammoth. I thought maybe the mammoth would be this unfortunate thing that stayed outside in the yard the entire story and mirrored Mawmaw’s own suffering, which it does, I think, but not in the way I originally planned. But I had no idea when I started that she’d bring it inside the house or talk to it or give it her fancy lotion or feed it her pills. I felt like I was navigating this along with Mawmaw.

Before she retired, Mawmaw was the financial administrator at a church called God’s Sacred Light, and she turns to the pastor for spiritual help when Shirley Temple Three falls ill. How important is Mawmaw’s faith? Did you want it to be shaken by the arrival of the mammoth?

Mawmaw’s faith is very important. She is a person who has for many years turned to her church and specifically to her pastor in difficult times. This makes her no different than many others of course. Unfortunately her particular pastor isn’t much help in this situation. I have a friend in the ministry who read this story, and I was telling him the other day that I was initially concerned about creating a pastor in this mold. Pastor Frank is almost too familiar. He’s got the annoying confidence that what he says and what he believes is Biblical truth. My friend made the observation that Frank’s deeply entrenched beliefs trump his faith. That is, the man’s beliefs are fixed, and his faith is shallow. I think that’s true. What Pastor Frank offers are easy answers. His basic philosophy is one of rejection. Rejecting new information and not asking questions leads to stagnancy, and stagnancy is probably more insidious to faith than a mammoth or the fossil record could ever be. I don’t think faith is something we arrive at or ever figure out. We’re all muddling through life, just like Mawmaw. She’s doing the best she can to make sense of the universe with the information she has. The mammoth is a big piece of new information that comes to live in her very own backyard. One option is to ignore it—which she does initially—and the other is to deal with it. I’m not sure that the mammoth shakes her faith, but it definitely forces her to reëxamine her beliefs.

You’re working on a collection of stories and a novel at the moment. Do mammoths show up anywhere else in your fiction?

They do actually—but not quite like this, not in the flesh. I recently wrote a story that might be the unintentional antecedent to Shirley’s story. It’s about American fossil hunters in the early nineteenth century. It was an interesting time for natural history and what would become paleontology. Some of the earliest fossil hunters were medical doctors and even ministers. That story involves a few mammoth and mastodon bones. But no Shirleys.

For whatever reason, bones, fossils, nearly-extinct creatures (and even a few fully-extinct ones, too) have been piling up in my stories recently. These are the stories, I hope, that might form a collection called “Hall of Small Mammals.”

Tommy, at forty-two, is a boyishly handsome man, but he’s not a reliable son. He’s bought his mother a new house, yet he rarely shows up to see her in it. And he leaves Mawmaw to take care of the mammoth, and then fails to answer any of her calls. Why did you decide to give this troublesome son a diminutive of your own name, Thomas?

People often ask me if I prefer Thomas, Tom or Tommy, and I always insist on Thomas. Well, Tom is okay. A few people call me Tom. But never Tommy. No offense to any Tommys out there. It’s just that Tommy, to me, is an entirely different person. I was joking about this with someone not long before I wrote “Shirley Temple Three,” and I got it into my head to write a character named Tommy who is nothing like me. And I might have failed on that count. You’ve been right in your descriptions of him—feckless, unreliable, troublesome. He is all those things. I’m not going to defend him, though I don’t want to reduce him to a total jackass. He has his good qualities, and I hope that makes their relationship messier and more complex. As you point out he bought his mother her house. He has a certain energy and charm. And, initially at least, he wants to save Shirley. I think Tommy is an easily excitable and overly idealistic guy. He’s not steadfast or strong. When things get tough…he splits. He doesn’t want to think about anything inconvenient, and the mammoth is a big inconvenience. I think children often dump their problems on their parents, and Tommy is no different. It’s just that the problem he dumped on his mother was a bit more unusual than most.